petri dish open house, sunday 09/20, 6-10PM

[aresnick.livejournal.com]

Hi!  My name's Alec Resinck, and a few weeks ago, some friends of mine and I started to renovate 339R Summer St., just past Rosebud's.  A few of us are working on an educational startup called sprout (our site is mostly a placeholder page for now, and will be growing significantly in the next few weeks) and we're sharing the space with some other friends of ours who are starting up their own organization called DINO.  We're new to Davis, and pretty excited to be here.

As part of our respective endeavors, we're working to set up an open community workshop and labspace.  While that's still ongoing, we decided to have an open house tomorrow from 6-10PM.  Our space is normally open to the public (even if that hasn't been well-advertised, yet), but from 6-10PM on Sunday the 20th, we'll be _extra_ open (which mostly means we'll have some food and light refreshments around).  So, if you want to swing by, say hey, and see what we're up to, we'd love to chat!  We're in the carriage house set back from the road--if you have any trouble finding us, feel free to give me a call/text at 617.229.5036 or send me an email at alec@thesprouts.org

If you'd like to take a look at the flier, you can find it here  NOTE: the date is a week off (instead of 09.13.09, it should read 09.20.09)

Please feel free to pass this along to whomever you think might be interested--thanks a bunch!


Gratefully,
a.

Comments

[thespian.livejournal.com]

this sounds really interesting. I'll try and come by.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

hey, i'll be out of town tomorrow, but i think this is just the best announcement in the community ever :) good luck, keep it up, & hope i get to see y'all there sometime :)

(i'm a neuroscientist btw, and doesn't everyone like to talk about brains? :)

[turil.livejournal.com]

Yay! I checked your website out after hearing about you on the HONKfest list, and was blown away at how cool the idea is. (I too am frustrated with how stifling most schools are for students, and want to start my own community center/school/art-space myself someday.)

I was sad that I missed the HONK event there last week. So this is perfect!

[ron_newman]

I'll try to stop by after RiverSing.

[darxus.livejournal.com]

There were way too many words before you got around to why I should show up (I'm assuming you eventually did, I didn't get that far).

[aresnick.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads-up on announcement design--I'll try to make it clearer in the future. If you get this far: sprout and DINO are doing pretty cool things in Davis, and we're having an open house where you can meet us, and see what's up with our space (which is open to public use).

Also, free food and beer =)

[darxus.livejournal.com]

Am I supposed to know what sprout and DINO are?

[aresnick.livejournal.com]

Nope, that's part of why we're having an open house! But, you can either check out the respective websites at http://thesprouts.org and http://dinospace.org or read on:

From sprout's site:
"""
sprout is a collective of community scientists united by a passion for playful experimentation and a desire to become better learners, teachers, and doers. We design tools to collect and visualize data and reveal chances for deep engagement with the scientific side of everyday life.

We are working to become better facilitators of our own and each other's learning, with a focus on sharing and documenting the projects we work on and the skills and understanding we acquire.

We want science to be a cultural activity. You can be a waiter from 9-5, jam with your friends at night, and still call yourself a musician. But you can't do the same for science, yet. Through sprout's future educational programs and soon-to-be-public labspace, we want to build a community of everyday experimentalists and open up the resources needed to support independent learning.
"""


From DINO's site:
"""
[Our] main focus is to build the community of hackers & makers in Boston and give people the support and knowledge they need to create and share their projects and ideas. We’ve teamed up with sprout, a community science center and open studio focused on making science personal and accessible, and took over the lease on a space close to Davis Square-
"""

[enochs-fable.livejournal.com]

This is great! I'd recommend taking the first sentence after the from site line for each startup and paste that in the main entry above, so people don't have to hunt to see it.

I'm not a scientist, but I'm particularly interested in the convergence of science and culture and the uses for data visualization.

Light refreshments?

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

Isn't that why? :)

Re: Light refreshments?

[darxus.livejournal.com]

My refrigerator is way closer.

Re: Light refreshments?

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

True. Also, much less of a swine flu risk.

Re: Light refreshments?

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

less of a noro risk.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

we're working to set up an open community workshop and labspace.

That's enough info for me. If it doesn't mean anything to you (and clicking on links provided even sooner than that is too much effort), then you're probably not the right person for this sort of thing anyway.

[mud-puppy.livejournal.com]

wow.. could you be any more curmudgeonly than that? Just sayin'

troll in the dungeon

[serious-noir.livejournal.com]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqx2Bt5bnKE

What I'm not sure about...

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

Is: what general age group are you aiming at? I know, you'll probably say that everybody is welcome etc etc. In practice, however, if you all are in your mid 20s, that is the crowd that you will attract, because of general compatibility issues.

Re: What I'm not sure about...

[aresnick.livejournal.com]

I can only really speak for sprout; although, I suspect that the people from DINO would say something similar.

With that caveat, I think the way a community's demographics work out is in part about who starts the community, but I'm confident that with some effort, we can make sure to seed our community with enough diversity so that it doesn't narrow to just one group. So far, we've been pretty successful--I'd guess that the median age at our last event was around 35 or 40, even though we are in our early 20's.

Our first project as sprout is working with an organization called Green City Growers, and they install raised bed gardens in people's backyards (and optionally maintain them) so that people can grow their own produce. In that context, we'll be working with people across all ages--that's one of the most exciting aspects of the project. Beyond that, we've all had experience running afterschool programs and camps for people aged 5-18, and are excited to bring more people in that age range into our space. So far, we've got a puzzle-focused math class running here for that age range, and it's been going pretty swimmingly.

To put it shortly, we're not focusing on a general age group: we want to be working with people up for deep investigation of the world around us.

Hopefully, being aware of the potential for 20-somethings to only attract more 20-somethings, we can mitigate that. I would be excited to hear any suggestions or examples of organizations that do that successfully.

Re: What I'm not sure about...

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

This sounds very interesting. I think I'll wait a bit and see how it develops, though (mostly, I'm a bit too busy right now). Those gardens sounds cool. Are you guys looking at roof gardens too (or perhaps just on roofs above porches)?...

Re: What I'm not sure about...

[serious-noir.livejournal.com]

I was at an event there last week and I would guess the median age was @ 33. I am older than that and wondered if I would feel welcome but it was all good.

Re: What I'm not sure about...

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

Thanks. That's good to know...

Re: What I'm not sure about...

[ron_newman]

I'm in my 50s and felt quite comfortable visiting tonight.

[ron_newman]

Tagging this "crafts" for want of something obviously better.